Twilio CEO slams Silicon Valley peers for being weak on hate speech

Twilio co-founder and CEO Jeff Lawson has had a charmed 2018. Even after the recent stock market slump, shares of his cloud software company have tripled in value this year, bolstering Lawson’s net worth by hundreds of millions of dollars.

For Lawson, a major turning point came in August 2017, when a white nationalist rally in Charlottesville led to a violent clash. During the event on Aug. 12, a man who had reportedly admired Hitler and spread racist views on social media plowed a car through a group of protesters, killing 32-year-old Heather Heyer.

Within days, Twilio changed its terms of service to explicitly prohibit use of its products for hate speech or in any way that the company believes “degrades, intimidates, incites violence against, or encourages prejudicial action against anyone based on age, gender, race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, disability, geographic location or other protected category.”

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Lawson said he made the decision after talking with his co-founder about how Twilio would respond if it discovered that the Ku Klux Klan was using its technology to organize a rally or promote a speech.

“None of us would be comfortable with that,” he said.

But Lawson recognizes there are challenges when it comes to creating and enforcing these types of policies, especially for products that are designed to be easily accessed by large groups of people. The line can be hard to draw.

For example, large social platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Facebook-owned WhatsApp are big Twilio customers. Fringe groups have used those services to spread conspiracies and misinformation.

While Lawson disapproves of many of the things that Facebook and Twitter allow to take place on their platforms, the primary purpose of those services is not to spread hate and and that “at the core, these aren’t hate groups.”

When it comes to this issue, “it’s a matter of stating our intentions to the world,” he said.

Lawson is not shy about identifying as a Democrat and said he tends to “lean left in my personal politics.” According to the Center for Responsive Politics, he’s contributed the maximum $2,700 individual donation to dozens of Democratic congressional candidates ahead of Tuesday’s midterm elections, as well as to Swing Left, an organization that’s trying to help Democrats win the House of Representatives.

Lawson insists that taking a stand against hate speech is not a political decision. And the same is true for issues like separation of immigrant families at the border, another subject that he’s blogged about, arguing that “staying silent doesn’t feel like leadership to me.”

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“As a tech leader and public CEO, I’m often advised to stay apolitical,” he wrote. “But this isn’t politics.”

Lawson said there may be the occasional employee who can’t get behind his messaging and decides to take a job elsewhere, or the odd customer that cancels its subscription. Very little of that is happening, he said.

“I recognize we have employees of many political leanings, and customers, even board members, of many different political leanings,” he said. “I’m just a firm believer that there are these certain issues defined by objective right and wrong.”